About Blumont:

Blumont works with communities around the world to take on big challenges. Whether it is delivering lifesaving humanitarian assistance, building the infrastructure that stabilizes communities, or helping to create economic opportunities for individuals and businesses, our work matters. What we do looks different in every community because the aspirations, needs, and opportunities of people in each community are unique. We are a dedicated team, more than 95 percent of whom are hired locally, providing relief, supporting recovery, and creating a more resilient future with the people and communities we serve.

Blumont’s humanitarian assistance efforts provide relief to communities in crisis. From refugee and displacement camps to communities recovering from conflict, our teams work to meet peoples’ basic needs, including safety, shelter, WASH, and trauma support. We prioritize the dignity of all we serve—ensuring that local voices inform activities and providing aid in line with humanitarian principles and standards.

Summary:

The Humanitarian Assistance, Technical Advisor will join Blumont’s Project Quality and Learning (PQL) Division based in Arlington, Virginia. Blumont currently provides support to more than 50 camps and informal settlements for refugees and displaced people throughout the Middle East, and this role is responsible for providing technical leadership, operational support, and guidance across this aspect of our work. The Technical Advisor will work closely with our Technical Director and early recovery advisor to ensure comprehensive support for Blumont’s humanitarian assistance portfolio.

This role will focus on support for refugees and displaced people through camp coordination and camp management (CCCM), including protection of well-being, rights, and dignity; service delivery; and other aspects of humanitarian assistance required as governments seek durable solutions to support these populations. S/he will work closely with Blumont’s PQL program teams (in the field and HQ) and Business Development team to help design and provide relevant technical support. S/he will represent Blumont in key humanitarian forums, ensure project quality, build capacity of teams, lead on business development, and contribute to the organizational learning across the shelter and protection portfolio.

Key Responsibilities:

Project Quality and Learning

• Ensure that camp and settlement-based humanitarian projects implemented by Blumont are of highest quality and meet global standards (i.e., Core Humanitarian Standards, SPHERE etc.)
• Promote systematic program learning to ensure that lessons learned are identified, documented, and shared across country programs and the overall portfolio.
• Support Blumont’s Humanitarian Assistance Technical Community of Practice to ensure global organizational best practices in the shelter and protection sectors are leveraged across all Blumont’s projects.
• Provide support to projects through technical backstopping, review, and refinement of implementation SOPs to ensure alignment with global best practices, and review and support for program reports and other donor deliverables.
• Support to country programs to ensure all tools, guidelines, and procedures required in emergencies and humanitarian contexts are in place, understood, and utilized by Blumont staff and partners.
• Lead on organizational learning products and tool development including humanitarian response plans, humanitarian manuals, white papers, and guidelines.
• Support monitoring and evaluation teams to ensure data and project learnings effectively inform current and future programming.
• Ensure that gender equality, safeguarding, and the centrality of protection is mainstreamed throughout humanitarian assistance projects.

Capacity Building

• Lead on identifying field technical staff capacity gaps and developing capacity building plans to improve program quality.
• Support the continual professional development of the field technical staff through a combination of approaches – remote training, on the-job support and guidance, in-person training, technical backstopping, advice etc.

Business Development

• Approximately 50% of the position will be dedicated to new and follow-up business development.  The primary role will be to act as the technical lead on proposals, guiding their development and ensuring the technical approach is in line with international best practices.  This role will also require the incumbent to lead the writing of a limited number of proposals.
• Maintain relationships with governmental and institutional donors and other key stakeholders for networking, consultation, and new business development.

Representation

• Represent Blumont at key humanitarian forums in Washington DC including relevant humanitarian coordination mechanisms, technical working groups, seminars, workshops, and donor meetings.

Skills and Competence:

• Minimum 10 years of international experience working in humanitarian assistance with at least five years of experience in leadership positions/advisory roles working with refugees and displaced populations, camp coordination and camp management, shelter & settlements, and protection.

• Robust knowledge of international norms, minimum standards, and best practices in the field.

• Master’s Degree in international relations, humanitarian assistance, social science, or other relevant fields and/or a Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field with at least five years of field experience.
• A track record in the solution design, development, and writing of successfully awarded proposals.
• Demonstrated capacity for strategic thinking and ability to respond effectively to changing contexts and new challenges.
• Strong experience in capacity building and mentoring of others. Demonstrated high level facilitation, coaching and mentoring skills.
• Excellent written communication skills including experience in proposal writing and donor reporting.
• Commitment to respect cultural differences and the ability to work effectively with people from a range of background and experiences.
• Evidence of knowledge on conflict sensitivity and Do No Harm approaches and how to apply these to humanitarian programming.
• Commitment to upholding protection principles and gender equality and knowledge of how to apply these to humanitarian programming.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience working in the MENA region.
• Experience providing capacity building, mentoring, and training using both remote and in-person approaches.
• Experience successfully working on or directly in a wide range of complex humanitarian settings including conflict, natural disaster, and climate change related contexts.
• Deep understanding of humanitarian architecture; principles; and emerging issues, policies, and practices within humanitarian assistance.

Travel Requirements:

• 10%-20% of time to the MENA region, and potentially other locations.

Physical Requirements:

• Normal Office Conditions.